The present invention relates generally to the field of computing, and more particularly to graphical user interface technology.
Many media streaming services host multiple resolutions of a video content so that the video content can reach more end users. To that end, when video content is uploaded to a media streaming service, the media streaming service will transcode the video content to multiple resolutions, including the original resolution, and several lower resolutions. The media streaming service will typically deliver a lower resolution version of the video content in order to preserve a fluid streaming experience (e.g., not pausing to buffer) for viewers without sufficient network bandwidth. However, for some video content, viewers may deem the lower resolution versions to be insufficient for the intended purpose of the media.
Transcoding is computationally intensive and usually requires powerful machine resources. The production of video content with resolutions that are too low to be consumed by viewers increases the associated processing costs, including, the machines required to process the lower resolution video content and the disk storage required to store the lower resolution video content. In addition, if viewers cannot consume the video content at the low resolution, data resources may be wasted in re-requesting the video content at a higher resolution.